If You Are Going To Play The Game, Play The Long Game: Owner Dependency

The Baker Who Never Built a Bakery

In The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber tells the story of Sarah, the overwhelmed pie baker who founded “Sarah’s Pies.”
She loved baking. Customers loved her pies.
But the business?
It was slowly crushing her.

She was the one opening the shop.
The one doing the books.
The one handling suppliers.
The one managing staff.
And when something went wrong — even something small — everyone ran straight to her.

She thought her problem was workload.
Gerber showed her the real problem: owner dependence.
Every day she spent working in the business pushed her further from building one she could someday step back from.

Owner Dependence Is a Silent Growth Cap

The biggest bottleneck in most small businesses isn’t capital, competition, or talent.
It’s the owner.

When the business depends on you to answer every question, approve every decision, solve every breakdown, and hold everything together, you’re not “leading.”
You’re plugging holes.

Owner dependence turns even good businesses into fragile ones.
One illness, one family emergency, one vacation… and everything stalls.

That’s not ownership.
That’s captivity.

Because Long Games Are Won by Owners, Not Operators

If everything relies on you, here’s what becomes impossible:

Scaling
Selling
Delegating
Innovating
Taking time to think instead of firefight
You can’t play the long game when your whole business is balanced on your personal stamina.

And more importantly:
You can’t think strategically when you’re always putting out fires.
Long-term decisions require space.
Owner dependence steals that space.

This is why so many SMBs hit the same wall year after year — the owner isn’t running the company.
The company is running the owner.

Shift From Being the Hero to Being the Architect

Start by identifying the recurring tasks or decisions that only you seem to touch.
Then build a system or assign a person who can carry each piece without you.

A simple path:

List the top five things that stop when you’re not around.
Choose one you will never touch again after the next 90 days.
Build the process, train the person, or automate the decision.
Hold the line — even when it’s faster to “just do it yourself.”
Your job is to make the business work without you, not through you.

Because Freedom Isn’t the Reward… It’s the Strategy

When Sarah realized her bakery wasn’t built to run without her, she rebuilt it.
Checklists. Roles. Routines. Standards.
Not because she wanted to work less — but because she wanted the business to last.

That’s the part most owners miss.
Building a business that can run without you is not an exit plan.
It’s the only way to play the long game while still having a life.

Here are the questions that make this real:

If you stepped away for 30 days, what would break first?
Who is carrying work right now that should actually belong to a system?
What decision are you making weekly that someone else should be making instead?
If someone offered to buy your business tomorrow, would the operation hold up without you?
If any of those questions sting, you’re not failing — you’re seeing the truth.

And that truth is a gift.

Because the moment you start removing yourself from the work is the moment your business starts growing beyond you.

 
The long game belongs to the owners who design themselves out of the center.
You are not the bottleneck — you are the builder!